It’s a wired world, a tweet-filled place overflowing with Facebook friends and infinite MySpace spaces, it seems.

Andre Goodman knows this, for he spends his days surrounded by the young(er) and restless texters, thumb typing almost as much as they speak. And he’s OK with that. Just don’t ask him to log in.

“I still put pen to paper,” Goodman said. “To me, I like to do things a certain way. If it works for me, I do it. And when I have something I want to remember, a thought or two to get out, I always write it down. I don’t like to type. I don’t know how people still use their phones to put dates in; to this day I still have a (day) planner I walk around with. I’m always writing in it. People see it and they think I’m crazy.”

Crazy? No, Goodman is a measured thinker, a calm exterior wrapped around the internal fire and brimstone of a comeback story.

Which is exactly why the eight-year cornerback now finds himself in the position former Broncos cornerback Dre Bly once called “the most popular place on the field and it ain’t gonna change until those guys look out and see something different.”

Popular to opposing quarterbacks because Goodman plays right cornerback, just as Bly did before him, just as Darrent Williams did before that. And the right cornerback is not the left cornerback in the Broncos’ defense.

The right cornerback is not Champ Bailey.

“You know I’ve never been that guy, the guy. I’ve always been the other guy,” Goodman said. “So I have kind of an all odds stacked against me mentality. That’s how my career has been built.”

And with the Broncos set to open their season Sunday at Cincinnati with a healthy Carson Palmer at quarterback for the Bengals, Goodman figures to begin a week-to-week march of wearing the target.

Because even as some personnel executives across the NFL believe Bailey has begun to gamble a little more here and there to get more involved, which has brought some occasional challenges from opposing quarterbacks like San Diego’s Philip Rivers who may not have tried before, Goodman will still get far more action.

Consider that last season, before he suffered a hamstring injury in Week 7 against New England that cratered his season, Bailey was virtually ignored in the first six games, including two games — against the Buccaneers and Jaguars — when no passes were even attempted to where Bailey was in coverage.

Bailey had a career-high 10 interceptions in 2006, roughly a third of the passes that were directed his way that year. Last year, former Broncos coach Mike Shanahan addressed the question with the face of a man who had a burning tire outside his office door.

“You can throw at a Hall of Famer or another player,” he said with a grimace. “One is the smart play, one isn’t so smart. You don’t have to be a genius there.”

“You know that,” Bly said. “You’ve got to compete, you know. Don’t take the job if you don’t want to compete, you won’t survive.”

“The challenge is you know you’re going to get a lot of work,” Goodman said. “I knew what I was getting into, I knew what it was going to be like playing across from Champ. You know the majority of balls were going to come my way. You have to see opportunity in that. The challenge is motivating.”

Goodman, if he’s about anything, is about challenges. Early in his freshman season at South Carolina, his football career was thought to be over when Georgia tight end Jermaine Wiggins crashed into Goodman’s right knee, tearing all the major ligaments.

Goodman was initially told he might never walk again without a limp, but he eventually returned to the field midway through his sophomore year. There’s an 8-inch scar to remember it all — as well as the poems he wrote as part of his recovery, one of which he laminated and kept in his locker for the remainder of his college career.

“If there was one significant moment in my life that I go back to, it’s probably that moment,” Goodman said. “I learned a lot about myself in terms of being able to push through adversity. At that point in time, it was easily the worst thing that had happened to me. I think you can kind of go either way there. You can either give up when someone tells you that it’s probably it for you because it’s going to be tough to come back from that kind of injury, or do you say, ‘I want to know what I could be?’

“I think because I took the latter, it kind of shaped my life. Nothing can ever get in my way in terms of adversity nothing can stop me.”

The Broncos offered a $25 million contract to put him across from Bailey.

“Even now, when it might seem like things are going OK for me, I never allow myself to think that way, to get comfortable,” Goodman said. “It allows you to work just as hard now as you did on Day One. . . . I think I’m fast, I think I’m pretty quick, I’ve got pretty good hips, I’ve got pretty good feet, but that’s stuff that was just given to me.

“The rest of it, recognizing route concepts, playing against offenses, those are the things I had to work on. And when I come to work, I know I’m coming to work with a purpose.”

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Tyreek Hill had touchdowns receiving and on a punt return, Kansas City’s defense made life miserable for Oakland quarterback Derek Carr, and the Chiefs beat the Raiders 21-13 on a frigid Thursday night to take control of the AFC West. Charcandrick West also had a touchdown run for the Chiefs (10-3). They moved into a first-place...